NYC Loses Appeal To Ban Large Sugary Drinks 532
mpicpp writes with good news for every New Yorker who needs 44oz of soft drink to be refreshed. New York's Court of Appeals ruled Thursday that New York City's ban on large sugary drinks, which was previously blocked by lower courts, is illegal. "We hold that the New York City Board of Health, in adopting the 'Sugary Drinks Portion Cap Rule,' exceeded the scope of its regulatory authority," the ruling said. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg had pushed for the ban on sugary drinks larger than 16 ounces as a way to fight obesity and other health problems.
Re:Let them drink! (Score:5, Informative)
Is there a per jump tax on skydiving or how do you'll handle that?
No, as it is not proven to be a measurable burden on the system beyond the cover provided by the base rate funded by taxpayers.
Is there a per mile tax on mountain biking or how do you'll handle that.
As above.
Is there a tax on watching TV (instead of exercising)?
No, watching TV is not in itself unhealthy.
On reading (instead of exercising)?
As above.
Is there a tax on flab?
No.
How, exactly, does all this work?
A base rate is funded by the taxpayers, activities (like smoking) that provide a significant and measurable burden to the system beyond what is funded by the taxpayers is taxed to reduce that additional burden.
A simple google search should help you to understand further details about how the Canadian system works.
Re:Let them drink! (Score:5, Informative)
Also, I know when I bring this up, it's bound to be controversial. But the research is easily found. Here's a reasonable summary [usatoday.com] (for a popular media story). Some interesting passages:
[S]mokers die some 10 years earlier than nonsmokers, according to the CDC, and those premature deaths provide a savings to Medicare, Social Security, private pensions and other programs.
Vanderbilt University economist Kip Viscusi studied the net costs of smoking-related spending and savings and found that for every pack of cigarettes smoked, the country reaps a net cost savings of 32 cents.
[SNIP]
Other researchers have reached similar conclusions.
A Dutch study published last year in the Public Library of Science Medicine journal said that health care costs for smokers were about $326,000 from age 20 on, compared to about $417,000 for thin and healthy people.
The reason: The thin, healthy people lived much longer.
Willard Manning, a professor of health economics and policy at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy Studies, was lead author on a paper published two decades ago in the Journal of the American Medical Association that found that, taking into account tobacco taxes in effect at the time, smokers were not a financial burden to society.
"We were actually quite surprised by the finding because we were pretty sure that smokers were getting cross-subsidized by everybody else," said Manning, who suspects the findings would be similar today. "But it was only when we put all the pieces together that we found it was pretty much a wash."
So, what's the REAL reason governments do this?
The goal of the U.S. health care system is "prolonging disability-free life," states the 2004 Surgeon General's report on the health consequences of smoking. "Thus any negative economic impacts from gains in longevity with smoking reduction should not be emphasized in public health decisions."
In other words -- governments deliberately avoid talking about the issue, lest it seem to encourage people to smoke.
By the way, there are similar studies about obesity -- in the end, it's not about savings.
Re:Let them drink! (Score:5, Informative)
How many hospitalisations per 100,000 pop are there from mountain biking?
According to the British Medical Bulletin, people racing mountain bikes experience 4 serious injuries per 100 hours of riding.
Re:Let them drink! (Score:4, Informative)
You may want to take that study that says smokers save society money with a MASSIVE grain of salt
I do. Which is the reason I provided the subsequent post which references a couple more studies. And I've seen at least three or four more studies on this topic which came to similar conclusions (and most of these done by people who have no relation to the tobacco industry).
If you've seen an economic analysis of smoking effects that comes to a different conclusion about overall lifetime healthcare and societal costs for smoking (not per year), please cite it for comparison.
Re:Not about consumption, but about sales (Score:5, Informative)
>> If a patron wanted, there was nothing stopping them from buying, say, 3 x 16fl oz drinks and gulp that all up. Alternatively, there was nothing stopping them from getting one 16fl oz drink and going for refills.
>> This was entirely on businesses, disallowing them to sell anything over 16fl oz.
This. Are people enraged and screaming "Tyranny!" about smoking bans and requiring cigarette packages to bear warnings? Largely, no. Why? Because aside from a lot of us either disliking second-hand smoke, or being a smoker and being unable to quit, the general consensus is that Big Tobacco was pretty evil - peddling a harmful and addictive product, and Big Government was the only one who could stop them.
See the analogy here? The (mostly large) corporations that provide our food have been pumping more and more high fructose corn syrup & fat into their products, and making them bigger and bigger. o.k., so you argue that they're just giving the people what they want. But that shit is *addictive* - just ask your local fatass sysadmin who lives on Monster and Doritos. Or go somewhere poor and count the obese people. Those people have a lot less "choice" - because Coke and McDonald's is *cheap*, in addition to being delicious.
In NYC (I think it's local), all chain restaurants are required to put calorie counts right next to the food on signs/menus, just like the cigarette companies. I fucking love McDonalds, but I stopped eating there. I'm a supposedly educated, well-off person with a relatively higher amount of "freedom" than some citizens. And I didn't know that almost everything on their menu was a *full day's* allotment of calories, until the Gubmint made them advertise it. (Since then, they've tacked on more lower-cal items, which is good.)
The reality is, advertising, doctoring of products to be addictive, and good ole' disingenuousness ("serving size: 8oz, servings per package: 2" on a can of Monster. What - do I put the other half in the fridge for later?), etc. is used to peddle crap to us all.
o.k., this is the basic nature of selling, you say. (Except for that goofy "make a better product" idea that some nuts espouse.) It's been that way forever. Fine. But when fully *one third* of us are obese, including tons of kids, and when the entities that are selling the stuff are so large that we couldn't possibly take them on, even together, then it's time for the one giant entity that exists to look out for us to level the fucking playing field. Who's going to argue that HFCS and ubiquitous advertising is somehow not manipulative? The gov't is just doing it's (relatively tiny) bit to help us choose to not be manipulated, just like with cigarettes & liquor.
I see the slippery slope - really. I used to be a card-carrying conservative. I'm still registered Republican, for crissake (though I've voted third party in every election since G.W.) But *everything* is a goddamn slippery slope - and a lot steeper in many cases. Why not take the energy you're wasting going full Enraged Libertarian on fucking soda issues, and point it at eternally renewable copyright legislation, or anti-pot laws - or, you know, the police state - by calling your congressthingies.
TL/DR: The gov't has a mandate to provide for the General Welfare. Obesity is an epidemic problem in this country. Making people think about their choices is *helping*, not fascism. Even at the cost of corps making slightly less money. Even if it's more expensive for the country, not less (see other posts for numbers.) And you can still drink 70oz. of Mountain Dew if you want, fatass.
Re:Let them drink! (Score:4, Informative)
we levy a tax that the government uses to cover the extra public healthcare costs that come from smoking.
The US had that too. It's called the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement. The idea was that tobacco companies would pay a one time fine(s) and a portion of their revenues in perpetuity, ostensibly to fund health care costs incurred by states providing care to those with tobacco related health problems and also for anti-smoking campaigns to discourage young people from taking up the habit. That was over 20 years ago now. What happened you ask? Well, the states were greedy and impatient. They wanted money now to spend on other things, so they bundled up most of their rights to the periodic payments into a series of bonds and sold them to get a lump sum now with the added benefit that the proceeds from the bond sales escaped the spending restrictions on the settlement payments. They could spend the bond money on whatever they wanted and they did on just about everything but health care and anti-smoking The part that they didn't sell off, now goes towards shoring up their budgets, although many states still run deficits, with very little actually spent on health care or anti-smoking. This perpetuates a perverse arrangement whereby the states are incentivized to have more young people start using tobacco so that those settlement payments keep rolling in. Not only that, but because the payments are based on tobacco company revenues it's bad for the states if tobacco profits decline because their remaining share then pays even less and they've already anticipated and spent that money in their yearly budgets. The tobacco companies now feed the money addiction of the states, just as they do the nicotine addictions of their smoker customers. The whole thing is just too damn funny, but there's a good lesson in this for the leftists out there. Government is perverse. It subverts any good intentions that you thought it had or wanted it to have and becomes instead a corrupt mockery of high minded liberal ideals. Like smoking, large government is a bad habit that's hard to kick once you get started, even though you know that it's harmful.
Re:Let them drink! (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure about you but for me
It's not about you, nor about me. It's about statistical averages of economic outcomes in society at large.
the difference would be made up in about 2 years of additional taxes that I get to pay on account of actually being alive not to mention the benefit to the economy of my general activities. Those monies would generally contribute to healthcare effectively repaying the cost of smoking.
Not on average. When you think of "smokers dying young," you probably think of some tragedy where some 40 or 50-year-old dies of lung cancer and leaves a family behind with some young kids. While that happens, so do random heart attacks (particularly for young males), even if they aren't smokers.
That's not the typical situation. On average, assuming you survive childhood in a developed country, you're now looking at a life expectancy of over 80 years. So, when we say that smokers lose a decade of lifespan, on average we're talking about people dying on average at 70-75 years old, rather than 80-85 or something.
How many people are still economically active and still contributing a net positive to society when they're over 70? Not many. They're often receiving Social Security, Medicare, pension or retirement benefits, etc. For the average non-smoker, we're not getting an extra 10 years of economic activity -- we're giving them an extra 10 years of retirement.
So, no, non-smokers will NOT repay society on average for living longer.
Otherwise one should consider the best option for society is banning new life altogether.
No -- that's the wrong conclusion. If you want to be heartless, the "best option" would be killing old people immediately after they retire and cease to be a net contributor to the economy. The "cheapest" person is the active productive smoker who works until he's 65 and drops dead immediately. The "most expensive" person is the non-smoker who lives to be 95 and goes through a litany of knee replacements, convalescence due to hip fracture, treatment of various minor cancers, then spends the last 10 years unable to care for himself due to dementia.
I'm NOT encouraging people to smoke. I'm NOT saying that we shouldn't value older people and encourage them to live long healthy lives.
What I am saying is that if we want to discourage people from smoking and ask them to pay more taxes, etc., we should be HONEST about the motivations and say -- "we're punishing you economically because we disapprove of the behavior, we think it's harmful to self and others, and we'd like you to live a long life." We should NOT try to justify such arguments by saying "Well, you cost more, so you have to pay in your fair share," because that's just not true.